Peter Sinclair: Life's just a breeze

Midnight, December 31, will find most of us hoisting a glass of something to toast the new millennium. Not Ashburton's Peter Lynn.

He will be hoisting his kite.

Kites will soar through the night at the Millennium Kite Festival beside New Brighton Beach's restored pier in Christchurch - one may even carry aloft a video camera for a sneak preview of the first dawn of the new age.

Lynn ( www.peterlynnkites.co.nz) is New Zealand's King of Kites, holder of the Guinness Book of Records title for the world's largest, the Megabite - nearly 1000 sq m of fabric which majestically took to the air at the Bristol Kite Festival in 1997.

Sounding, on the phone at least, uncannily like Tim Shadbolt and as breezy as one of his own aerial creations, he told me his midCanterbury workshop employs 15 people to build and dispatch his kites all over the world. Only about 1 per cent of sales are within New Zealand. More than 80 per cent of sales are made on the Internet.

Kites have attended millennium parties before. Chinese bird kites are recorded around 500 BC (www.chinavista.com/experience/kite/kite.html), and the Japanese are said to have fired arrows from theirs into besieged cities.

The ancient Indonesian fishing kite couldn't have been more eco-friendly: palm fronds on bamboo frames with a flying line of pineapple-leaf fibre.

More recent kites have served us on land (George Pocock bumped round Europe in a char-volant, or "flying chariot," early last century, doing up to 40 km/h and packing an emergency pony for windless afternoons) and at sea (Colonel Sam Cody crossed the English Channel in a kite-drawn canoe in 1903, for some reason - (www.heureka.clara.net/surrey-hants/cody.htm).

Even today, we continue to harness the wind. On their way to the South Pole last Christmas, Peter Hillary's team hitched their sleds, like merchants of the Chinese plains 4000 years ago, to steerable kites or "quadrifoils" (www.quad- rifoil.com) which tugged them over the permafrost like so many high-flying huskies.

Lynn says that "kite traction," a term covering kite buggies, kite-skiing and kite-surfing, is a growth sport - it was he who invented the kite buggy (www.nwlink.com/~sirby/kitepage.html), which combines the exhilaration of flying, sailing and driving.

"They can go up to 100 km/h," he said, "but over 75 km/h it gets pretty hairy." Hairiness notwithstanding, he's exported more than 16,000 to date.

Readers who wish to recapture carefree kite-flying days can visit the Kite Flyer's Site (www.kfs.org/kites) where more than 500 hyperlinks and 200MB of archives will swiftly carry you back to your youth; or log into the International Kite Ring at (www.dragenet.dk/kitering) Kite festivals are held all over the world, too. My pick is the Maharaja of Jodhpur's, which includes a banquet at the palace with his highness after the judging.

Check out Gomberg Kites (www.gombergkites.com) for more kite-world info, and surf innumerable kite graphics: Germany's spectral Ghost Deltas trailing squid-like tails 11m long, Celtic kites like flying quilts, Lynn's own giant Gecko wriggling realistically towards heaven. And only the British could conceive a knickers kite - "Natalie's Legs," complete with frilly panties, suspender belt and stockings.

Fly Bob's Java kite (www.best.com/~bsteele/java/kite.Html) or consider building your own at Anthony's Workshop (www.sct.gu.edu.au/~anthony/kites), where technokites like Rotors and the 12m Circoflex spin through the sky like UFOs.

I'd forgotten how much fun boyhood used to be. Next time someone tells me to go fly a kite, I just might.